ABSTRACT
The room lined with rows of ideal sculpture in Hawthorne’s “A Select Party” might have been inspired by the sculpture gallery of the Boston Athenaeum (Fig. 1.1). Among the Athenaeum’s large collection of antique casts was the sculptural group of Laocoon and his sons (Fig. 1.2), itself a Roman copy of a Greek original and one of the first ancient sculptures to be exhibited as a plaster copy in the United States.
